Battle of Maldon poem preserved by scholar David Casley

“Who?” – I hear you ask.

Born, nowhere near here, but in far-off Leeds, in 1682, this talented scholar was first the deputy and then keeper of the Cotton, or Cottonian Library – a collection of priceless, ancient manuscripts, once owned by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton MP (1571-1631) and left to the nation by his grandson in 1700.

It is now (or what’s left of it) part of the British Library, but before it moved it was housed in a number of successive locations – including Ashburnham House, near the Palace of Westminster.

It was here that academics and antiquarians would gather to study the precious documents, all under the watchful eye of the keeper and his staff.

Then, on October 23, 1731, disaster struck.

A massive fire broke out, damaging 200 manuscripts and completely destroying an irreplacable 13 others.

The old-English poem Beowulf was one of those heavily affected, but at least it survived.

Not so lucky was the near contemporary Battle of Maldon. Also described as a “poem” (according to EV Gordon, “the most heroic of all poems”), it was originally a “song” of oral transmission, but was written down, some time in the late 11th Century, by a Benedictine monk at the Monastery of Worcester, and attached to Asser’s Life of King Alfred.

By the time it found its way into the Cotton collection, the poem had been separated from Asser’s Life and, really frustratingly, the front and back pages had gone missing.

It was, nevertheless, the only known manuscript of the poem and one of the most important pieces of early English literature, central to the study of Anglo-Saxon England, the Danish incursions and, of course, a main plank in Maldon’s story.

Now it was gone, lost to the nation in that dreadful conflagration.

Enter stage left David Casley. It transpired that he had made a copy, or transcription, of the 325-line fragment on to three double sheets, folded to make six leaves or 12 pages, and all done just a few years before the original fell victim to the flames.

That would have been around 1724 and in 1726 it first appeared in print, published by the Oxford scholar and antiquary Thomas Hearne (1678-1735), as appendix seven in volume two of his edition of John of Glastonbury’s Chronicle.

The Casley transcription that he used then, incredibly, went missing and wasn’t rediscovered until the 1930s, when the Anglo-Saxon scholar Neil Ripley Ker found it tucked away in the Bodleian Library, where it still resides (as ‘MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Rawlinson B.203’).

The cover of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s translation of the Battle of Maldon (Image: Stephen Nunn)

That precious transcription is headed in David Casley’s own distinctive hand: “Fragmentum quoddam historicum de Eadrico…” (“a certain historical fragment of Eadric”).

Intriguingly, Eadric was one of Byrhtnoth’s thegns, a warrior at the battle, specifically mentioned by name in the poem: “…Eadric intended to support his lord, his master in the battle…”.

It is a bit of a mystery as to why the poem was specifically linked to Eadric.

Another hand, that of Thomas Hearne, notes that he “received the transcript from Richard Graves on October 19, 1725” (the antiquary of that name, born 1677, died 1729).

Hearne then incorrectly records that the document was “transcribed by John Elphinston, Under Keeper of the Cotton Library”, a spurious assertion that was not corrected until relatively recently when HL Rogers properly ascribed it in his The Battle of Maldon: David Casley’s Transcript (Notes and Queries, new series,1985).

Casley’s copy has since been re-copied and translated many times and in many languages. Maldon’s foremost historian, Edward Arthur Fitch (1854-1912), relied on Benjamin Thorpe’s Saxon version of 1884 and Col HW Lumsden’s “spirited paraphrase” English translation of 1887.

At school we used Kevin Crossley-Holland’s version (Macmillan, 1965). I still have my copy and was privileged to meet Kevin a few years back.

I also like and have copies of EV Gordon’s edition of 1937 and the late Donald Scragg’s of 1981.

All of those works relied on David Casley’s foresight and that is why we have a lot to thank him for – not least here in Maldon.